The Government thinks Ofsted will ensure SEND reform accountability. This evidence suggests ‘significant concern’.

Contents

If you sat in on our Schools White Paper webinar with Department for Education Minister, Georgia Gould, last month, you’ll have heard plenty of concerns from parents about accountability in a future reformed SEND system.

The Minister responded to those concerns by pointing to Ofsted’s role in holding schools and services to account.

So what role does Ofsted play here, and what role will they play in the future?

Ofsted’s SEND Inspection Remit

Ofsted inspects SEND services in two ways. Firstly, it inspects individual education settings. The inspectorate revamped its education inspection framework last year, and it now includes a specific judgement on the quality of inclusion. We’ll tackle this in a future post.

Ofsted also works with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to inspect SEND services in ‘local area partnerships’. These are made up of

the local authority’s SEND services,
the SEND services offered by each area’s NHS health bodies, known as Integrated Care Boards (ICBs)—sometimes more than one per LA—that operate within the LA’s boundaries,
the relevant LA social care services, and
alternative provision within the LA’s boundaries

Ofsted and CQC have been inspecting SEND services since 2016. In 2023, they changed their ‘area SEND’ inspection framework, with more emphasis on the lived experience and outcomes of children and young people, and less emphasis on compliance with statutory duties.

There are 153 ‘local area partnerships’ for Ofsted and CQC to inspect, and they’re aiming to inspect all of them at least once under the current inspection framework by the end of 2027. So far, they’ve issued inspection reports for 91 partnerships under this framework.

Area SEND Inspection Outcomes

The area SEND inspections use a grading system that’s different from the systems used to assess schools and local authority children’s services.

With area SEND inspections, there are three possible grades:

The best possible outcome, which we’ll shorten to ‘positive,’ is this:

“The local area partnership’s SEND arrangements typically lead to positive experiences and outcomes for children and young people with SEND. The local area partnership is taking action where improvements are needed.”

Local area partnerships rated as ‘positive’ will be inspected again in around five years. You don’t need to demonstrate anything like an outstanding service to get this grade.

The middle-ranking outcome in the new inspection framework, which we’ll call ‘inconsistent’, runs like this:

“The local area partnership’s arrangements lead to inconsistent experiences and outcomes for children and young people with SEND. The local area partnership must work jointly to make improvements.”

If this is the outcome, then the local area partnership’s next full inspection will be brought forward, to within three years, rather than five. Local area partnerships that were rated as ‘inconsistent’ in 2023 are now starting to be inspected again.

The lowest possible outcome, which we’ll shorten to ‘significant concerns’ – is this:

“There are widespread and/or systemic failings leading to significant concerns about the experiences and outcomes of children and young people with SEND, which the local area partnership must address urgently.”

There’s no formal definition of how significant these concerns must be for them to be considered a ‘priority action’, it’s basically a matter of inspector judgement.

If a local area partnership gets this outcome, it has to produce a priority action plan showing how the failing areas are going to be improved. Most of the time, it’ll also be subject to a formal improvement notice from the Department for Education.

A local area partnership with this outcome also gets a monitoring inspection 18 months on. In practice, it’s more like 24-30 months between the initial inspection and the monitoring inspection.

How are Area Partnerships faring under the newest framework?

We’ve now had inspection reports for 60% of local area partnerships under the 2023 framework. So what do the results look like?

If you want to see whether your local area partnership has been inspected yet under the current framework, or how their inspection has panned out, check the image below, or alternatively, check the interactive map here.

You can find Ofsted and CQC’s area SEND inspection reports here.

Ofsted / CQC Area SEND Inspection Outcomes
Last updated: 31 May 2026. View interactive version here

After three-and-a-bit years, inspection outcomes under the 2023 framework look like this:

19 local area partnerships have been graded as ‘positive’
50 have been graded as ‘inconsistent’
22 have been graded with ‘significant concerns’

Bear in mind here that a ‘positive’ grading means the inspectors judged that children and young people “typically” get positive experiences and outcomes, and that the inspectors didn’t find any “widespread and/or systemic failings.”

That means at the individual level, it’s entirely possible for services to completely, utterly and even lethally fail your child, without that failure necessarily impacting the inspection grade.

The maximum grade in area SEND inspections is a far, far lower and fuzzier bar to clear than it is for school or social care inspections. And yet, only one in five local area partnerships has, to date, managed to clear that bar.

The regional picture

The spread of inspection outcomes looks like a basic bell curve, but there’s a fair bit of variation by region:

Local area partnerships in London, the Yorkshire & Humber region, and the North East tended to get ‘positive’ ratings more frequently than the national average.
Inspectors were more likely to find reasons for significant concern about SEND services in the East Midlands, the North West and the South East than the national average.

Some of the things that tend to earn positive grades from area SEND inspectors have remained pretty consistent over the last three years:

Joint working: evidence that education, health and social care leaders are working together constructively and coherently, with clear strategic ambitions.
Good working relationships with children and young people with SEND and their families;
Early identification of need, and rapid access to specialist support; and
Credible self-evaluation: partnerships that know their own strengths and weaknesses (and can explain what they’re doing about the weaknesses) tend to get better grades. Bear in mind, though, that no one seems to go back and see whether the “plans for action” that appear at the time of inspection actually have an impact.

Areas of significant concern

If inspectors have judged a local area’s SEND services as having ‘significant concerns’, it means they’ve found one or more areas where they believe priority action is needed. These almost always include dysfunctional joint commissioning and joint working between education and health services, and problems with leadership and strategy. More often than not, they’ll include problems with Education, Health and Care Plan processes or specific service weaknesses.

Every area SEND inspection—even the ones with a positive outcome—will throw up areas of improvement. These are things that inspectors have judged the local area partnership needs to work on before the next inspection, but which inspectors judge don’t meet their threshold for priority action.

The most common areas for improvement identified by inspectors include the following:

Specific service weaknesses, particularly in health – these are the most common area for improvement, by miles – particularly assessment pathways for neurodivergence support, and mental health, but also speech and language therapy and wheelchair services.
Most aspects of the EHCP process – including the timeliness of the process, plan quality, and the EHCP annual review system
Leadership, strategy and joint working are sometimes found wanting – and sometimes, also the quality of the partnership’s engagement with families.

Area SEND Inspection Outcomes 2023-March 2026. View an interactive version here Infographic by Tania Tirraoro

This process relies very heavily on inspectors’ judgement. The framework they use is supposed to prioritise the lived experiences and outcomes of children and young people with SEND, but the number of individual cases tracked is tiny. Because of resource limits, simple prioritisation and the inspectors’ revealed preferences, that means things like the partnership’s compliance with statutory duties aren’t particularly influential on inspection outcomes.

And it shows. As a local area partnership, it’s entirely possible to be in egregious and industrial-scale breach of your statutory duties without a severe impact on your inspection outcome. You’ll need to show you’re aware of where you fall short, and you’ll need to have a credible-looking plan to improve things. But often, that’s about it.

Essex, a case in point

Take Essex for example. We’ve picked this LA simply because it’s a recent and typical example. Its most recent EHCP data shows pretty clearly that the service has significant and systemic weaknesses. Just 16% of new EHCPs were completed within the statutory 20-week deadline in 2024, though that was an improvement on 2023’s rate of only 1%.

Ofsted seniors occasionally say that there’s no real impact on a child if it takes the LA a couple of weeks more than the deadline to get an EHCP completed: but in Essex in 2024, more than one in five EHCPs took over a year to complete, affecting 385 children.

We have no data for 2025 yet, but Essex LA recently announced a £2.6m investment in staff to tackle an EHCP backlog which very clearly still exists.

Ofsted and CQC inspected Essex in January 2026. They identified problems with the timeliness and quality of the partnership’s EHCPs, including inaccurate health and social care information and a lack of specificity of provision. They noted the things that the partnership said they were doing to remedy some of these problems.

Inspectors decided that this was an area for the local area partnership to improve on, not an area for priority action. In their view, there was no significant or systemic weakness to see here: not for the hundreds of children and young people who had been waiting more than a year for their EHCP to be finalised, not for the more than 5,000 children and young people whose EHCP annual reviews were overdue.

Essex’s overall area SEND inspection rating was ‘inconsistent’, the middle grade. That means Ofsted and CQC won’t be back to inspect for another three years or so.

What about other areas?

Essex isn’t alone here. There are plenty of other local area partnerships getting an ‘inconsistent’ grade despite significant service weaknesses that deeply affect the education of children and young people with SEND. For example:

Dudley, where kids in need of wheelchair services were waiting for more than a year for assessment and provision of equipment, where children registered with CAHMS were waiting over two years for therapy post-assessment, and where EHCPs are highly variable in quality and rarely appear in clinical records. No significant weaknesses identified, inspectors to return in roughly 2028.
North Yorkshire, where EHCPs “do not routinely contain sufficient or current information about the social care or health needs of children, including the support and services being provided to meet those needs, [and] advice submitted by practitioners is not always incorporated into the plan,” and where only one in seven EHCP annual review decisions are made within statutory timescales, impacting over two thousand children and young people. No significant weaknesses identified, see you again in three years or so.
Cornwall, where botched implementation of a neurodevelopmental profiling tool has exacerbated already-lengthy waiting times for assessment, chewed up large quantities of school admin time, and pushed families into ‘elective’ home education until the local area partnership can get their act together. Oncce again, no significant weaknesses identified, ta-rah, inspectors to return in 2029. Maybe.

And that’s before we even get started on Barnsley, which recently found itself the recipient of a ‘positive’ area SEND inspection result despite this clear failing that had lethal results.

Inspection Outcomes by region. View an interactive version here. Infographic by Tania Tirraoro

Monitoring inspections

But despite all this, some local area partnerships do get rated with the bottom grade in area SEND inspections. What happens to those that do?

Since 2023, Ofsted and CQC inspectors have found significant concerns requiring priority action in roughly one in four of the local area SEND partnerships that they’ve inspected.

When a local area partnership falls into this category, the partnership has to produce a priority action plan, which inspectors are then supposed to review via a ‘monitoring inspection’ which takes place roughly 18 months afterwards.

Things have been a bit delayed. At the time of writing, there have been eight area SEND monitoring inspections with completed reports, all from initial inspections that took place in 2023.

Inspectors found that all eight local area partnerships had taken effective action to address some of the significant concerns identified in the 2023 initial inspections. Only two local area partnerships—Halton and Suffolk—had a remaining concern where effective action had not been taken.

On paper, this looks like a distinct improvement from the previous inspection cycle in 2016, where local areas would frequently crash and burn through initial inspections and revisits.

But it’s hard to tell whether there has actually been an improvement over the last cycle. The inspection frameworks are different, “effective action” is in the eye of the beholder, and most of the areas for priority action are in the strategic management domain, where it often takes forever for change to percolate down to the front line.

Does any of this matter?

Yes, it definitely does matter.

We’re entering into a period of profound SEND system reform. Over the last few months of engagement and consultation, whenever parents have raised their deep, deep concerns with SEND system accountability, the Department for Education (DfE) consistently says that Ofsted inspections will make accountability work for families.

The DfE says that some of that is going to happen using the recently-revamped Ofsted education inspection framework, which now has an inclusion judgement.

We’ll look at this school-level framework in practice soon. But to give you an idea of what to expect, a school leadership union recently analysed over 660 Ofsted school inspection reports issued from January to April 2026. Ofsted judged that 9% of these 660+ schools exhibited inclusive practice that either needed attention or urgent improvement. For pupil achievement, the same figure was 28%.

That might look encouraging – if only one in every 11 schools has a problem with inclusion, then the SEND reforms will be a cakewalk. The problem is, you’d have to be on glue to actually believe that only one in eleven schools needs serious help with inclusion.

Promoted

What will the reforms mean for area SEND inspection?

The inspection framework is going to be overhauled again, “to align to the clarified statutory roles that local authorities and ICBs will have in relation to children and young people with SEND.”

The new area SEND inspection framework will undergo consultation, with the aim that it’ll be introduced at the same time as the legislative SEND reforms in September 2029. In the meantime, the current framework will stay in place.

It’s far too early to know what the new area SEND inspection framework will look like. But the chances that it’ll fill the accountability gap for families are very low.

Or put more charitably, Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission cannot—and will not—manage accountability in a way that will work adequately for parent carers. Because we look at accountability very differently to system leaders.

Most of the time, parent carers want accountability at the individual level. Why did that organisation make that decision about my child? Did it make that decision in its own best interest, or that of my child? Was that decision flawed, or even lawful? And what—and who—is going to stop that organisation from knowingly doing the same thing again to another kid just like mine?

The accountability that Ofsted and CQC are being asked to provide isn’t like that.

For all their claimed focus on the lived experience and outcomes of children and young people with SEND, area SEND inspections concentrate on system performance. They judge on what they see typically happening to a broad cohort. They judge on what the local system knows about itself, and what the system wants to achieve at a broad level. They are mostly interested in strategic things, not operational or individual things.

There are plenty of problems with using this approach when it comes to SEND. For one thing, judging performance on the basis of what typically happens in a local area partnership means you’re less likely to pay attention to seemingly atypical, high-impact events, less likely to report on them, and less likely to flag them up for improvement.

At its extreme, you would never guess from any area SEND inspection report that kids with SEND die avoidable deaths because of upstream failure to deliver services. Reading these reports, you’d assume Tribunal and Ombudsman cases are unusual examples of parental disaffection, rather than evidence of deeper problems with decision-making.

‘It’s okay, we have a plan’

Many area SEND inspection reports say the local area partnership has a plan to deal with a problem: you never find out whether the plan worked, or why the previous five plans failed to deliver.

There isn’t any agreement on what constitutes an acceptable level of SEND service. In the absence of a clear direction, and as they decided to deprioritise statutory compliance, Ofsted and CQC are essentially freestyling it.

There are no clear definitions or thresholds for what constitutes widespread or systemic failure within a SEND service. There isn’t a clear definition of what constitutes effective action in a monitoring inspection. Based on the revealed preferences of Ofsted and CQC reports, there are things that are acceptable in area SEND that would not be acceptable in many other domains.

More often than not, problems in a local area’s EHCP processes with industrial-scale impact—things that affect thousands of students and dozens of schools—will be treated as ‘areas for improvement’, rather than an area for priority action.

More often than not, multi-year waiting lists for autism, ADHD, mental health services, or speech and language therapy assessment will be treated as areas for improvement, not areas for priority action.

Imagine a school or academy trust telling Ofsted’s education inspectors that it was ambitious for its pupils, but only provided an effective and balanced curriculum to a bare majority of them. It would have its arse royally and deservedly handed to it by inspectors. But in most cases, that performance level is enough to get you the top inspection grade in area SEND.

Accountability like this is close to useless for families. Our kids don’t have the luxury of time. Through inspection design, resource limits and revealed preference, the gap between inspectors identifying a problem and checking whether that problem is being solved is measured in years—and their definition of ‘solved’ isn’t the same as ours.

We can’t wait years for inspectors to determine whether the third reboot of the local area partnership’s spasmodic improvement journey is the one that’ll definitely fix things. If experiences and outcomes for our kids have been unusually bad, we can’t afford to have a positive inspection outcome shoved in our faces for the next five years whilst nothing happens.

And if the worst has already happened to our kids’ lives and life chances, we want to make damn sure that it won’t be happening to other kids like ours. These inspections cannot give us that assurance.

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Matt Keer

Matt (he/him) has two deaf children. He has over 20 years of experience grappling with the SEND system as a parent, and he’s seen the best and the worst that the SEND system offers.
Matt specialises in SEND stats, data analysis, and in-depth investigations of policies. He has given evidence to several Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries, and his articles for SNJ on SEND funding, local government policy, and the SENDIST Tribunal have been quoted in Select Committee inquiry reports and national media.

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